Do they see dead people? Tracking down the truth about spooks in a hotel full of ghost hunters.

Fixed to a tripod, the camcorder is trained on the stalls. I peer through the viewfinder: The infrared gives a cool, greenish tint to the pipes and cement walls. But it’s a deceptive cool. The July heat wave is on and the Stratford Hotel A.C. is dead. Even here, at 2 a.m. in the ladies’ room — and Bing Crosby breezing from the portable tape deck on the baby-changing station (eerily crooning: "all the way from Phil-a-del-phi-ay") — it is, as folks here in Alton, IL, say, hotter than blazes.

I get the feeling Rene would stay with us until dawn if it meant we would see a ghost — that our documentary will somehow be incomplete if we don’t leave converts. Ed, my partner, leans against a sink, rubbing his eyes, headset collared. Our equipment looks measly next to Rene’s, which requires two duffel bags and a caddy (tonight that caddy is me and Ed). She carries back-up batteries for everything: electromagnetic meter, infrared camera, thermal scanner. Ghosts, she says, will sap a battery "dry at the drop of a hat." They will throw cameras out of focus. To ward off such snafus she asks the spirits for permission. She coaxes them like houseplants. Dabbing at herself with a cold beer from the hotel bar, Rene Horath, Ph.D., professor of industrial engineering — a kind but tedious pedagogue — attempts to bridge the gap between sound wave physics and supernatural orbs of light. Or: why non-entities prefer swing to church hymns. But mid-lecture we are cut off. Someone needs to piss.

Rene Horath, like most of her fellow ghost hunters, quickly points out there are no experts in her field. It is a dodgy qualifier that we will hear many times this weekend in Alton, where 150+ ghost hunters have gathered at the Stratford for the third annual American Ghost Society convention. Even the conference host, Troy Taylor, has only been investigating six years. Before that he ran a paranormal bookshop and a haunted trolley tour in Decatur. He was an active member of the nation’s largest pack, the International Ghost Hunters Society. Soon after he broke from IGHS (secession, schisms and internal strife are common among the wonkish egos of the ghost club capos), he organized his own posse, the American Ghost Society (AGS). He moved his bookshop to Alton in ’98. Pressed to explain ghost theory, Troy is candid but circumspect. He hedges his bets. When I ask if he considers himself a scientist, he says, "I’m sure that any scientist would call me a pseudoscientist of the worst sort."

Ed and I arrived yesterday. We’re staying at the Comfort Inn across town. It turns out we’re not disappointed that the Stratford is booked. Not just because of the fritzy A.C., but because it’s nice to have a retreat. Ed, who works for CNN Radio, first interviewed Troy last Halloween. We’ve come to Alton to do a more thorough freelance documentary with the slim hope of peddling it to NPR. On our way through Ohio and Indiana in our black, roomy parlor of a rental Buick — the trunk crammed with quasi-legal fireworks for my brother — we talk shop. Having never personally seen or felt anything I could chalk up to the hijinks of undead or lost souls, I am a shade more skeptical than Ed. Ed, years back, while squatting in a London slum, did have one extremely weird experience, and he was sober, and it was persistent, and he wasn’t the only one to see it. I believe his story entirely. But I know Ed.

There are no level streets in Alton. You are either driving uphill or you are driving downhill. Across the Mississippi from St. Louis, the city teeters on bluffs. Home to the tallest man in history (Robert Wadlow, 8 feet, 11.1 inches), Alton also claims the distinction of being Golgotha to the first white abolitionist martyr, Rev. Elijah Lovejoy (1837). Come winter, migrant bald eagles hog the bridges and docked barges. From its Bates Motel-like aerie, the Stratford looks down even over the town’s colossal industrial gizzard, the ConAgra grain mill. It was the desk manager at the Stratford who told me about the eagles. As for Robert Wadlow, the Guinness Book of World Records says so, and I saw his statue, so it must be true.

Troy Taylor is introducing the first keynote speaker when we straggle into the convention. Behind him a gaunt, bland-featured techie fiddles with a mess of blinking gizmos laid out like a smorgasbord. There is nothing in the way of refreshment except 14 brimming pitchers of ice water. Ed, pouring himself a cup while I scout for seats, dumps a full pitcher. Troy, who wears a strawberry-blond goatee and a Band-Aid over his left eye, whose forearm is tattooed with a biker rose, who is both cherubic and menacing — he could play either good cop or bad cop — disregards the ice floe moving steadily toward the podium. When the woman at the door hands me my nametag (she also staffs one of several souvenir booths), she whispers that the lady sitting in the front row wearing turquoise sportswear separates has requested that she be pointed out to me. It is the Pennsylvania AGS rep, Rene Horath.

A few weeks earlier, Rene kindly answered my probing e-mails. She explained her theories in progress about sound vibration and the appearance of orbs, or "spook lights," the lowest-grade apparitions (full-bodies being the rarest and, naturally, the most coveted). We discussed how a ghost "manifests" by feeding off electrons (or protons, it’s unclear) and how that transference causes cold spots and disturbances in the electromagnetic field — thus the need for EMF meters and thermal scanners. She sent a sampler of orbs she’d captured both on infrared video and regular 35mm film. I didn’t care to linger over my nagging feeling that a certain amount of wishful thinking was at play behind the semi-transparent dots she caught on video, but something about the still photos, presumably all from the same roll, did give me pause. "Orbs" with distinctly similar shapes appear in precisely the same areas of multiple pictures. Where a gibbous milkspot appears in the upper left-hand corner of a cemetery, a gibbous milkspot appears in the upper left-hand corner of a garage, where a gibbous milkspot appears in the upper left-hand corner of a basement staircase. In Troy’s opinion 90 percent of orbs are either dust or the fickle play of light. He dismisses most spirit photographs as double exposure, chemical accident, lens flare or just plain fraud. Nonetheless, I will take up Rene’s offer to play with her equipment the night after the haunted trolley tour.

The gaunt techie turns out to be the keynote speaker. President of the Chicago Ghost Research Society, Dale Kaczmarek is Troy’s mentor. His delivery is as pallid as his complexion, but we make a concession because (even though there are no experts) he’s the one that’s been ghostbusting for 25 years.

It’s considered a faux pas to profit directly from ghost research. Most ghostbusters don’t charge for actual investigation. If they don’t have day jobs — most of them, including Dale, do — they make money selling books, equipment and registrations for conferences like this one ($150 a head). The IGHS now offers a "Home Study Course for the Certified Ghost Hunter Diploma" ($149.95). Dale’s assistants sell T-shirts and hats and videos and a bunch of eclectic used books on everything from Bigfoot to the Amityville Horror. Tomorrow, conventioneers will pay 10 bucks to walk through a condemned building.

Without so much as a bad joke Dale cuts to the chase — to the cluster of gizmos — his specially patented ghostbusting repertoire known acronymically as GEIST: a blinking nexus of motion-detector/Geiger-counter/negative ion-detector/EMF meter/voice-stress analyzer and oscilloscope, all networked to a laptop that he proudly lets us know sets its watch "by military time." An experiment I vaguely remember from sixth grade concerning ionic charge is repeated here when Stanley, Dale’s assistant, comes up to scrape a comb across his thinning pate.

From where I sit I can see Dale’s homunculus in the viewfinder of a Sony digital camcorder manned by a dude in the front row who is outfitted like a war correspondent. Beside me, a lady with dimply knuckles takes voracious notes. A thermal scanner like a Glock peeks out of her purse. A woman in front of me wears a handmade T-shirt with the URL of her local spook guild. The whole weekend I am haunted by the thought that we might as well be at a metal detector enthusiasts’ convention. Both groups employ expensive gadgetry with gauges and needles that readily fluctuate and knobs marked "squelch." Both draw history buffs. It is difficult to get a demographic profile. The closest thing to a child is a 16-year-old girl, lips pierced with what looks like a golf cleat. There’s an aberrant redneck or two in John Deere caps (one wearing a Titanic shirt — salty Leo kissing Kate). Other than that, dimply knuckled Botero ladies hold court.

Dale pontificates. While fast-forwarding through a video of raw footage, he tells us that we are co-existing with the spirit world. That when you see something out of the corner of your eye it is probably paranormal. That dogs can smell ghosts. That when you see a cat pawing at an invisible speck on the wall, it’s probably not an invisible speck. That when you feel or hear something strange you should not dismiss it out of hand as "natural." That when your lights flicker, when your TV goes fuzzy, it’s probably a ghost. Those prickly things on the back of your neck? That’s them. That ghosts are like parasites because they feed off our electromagnetic radiation. (The same way they feed off toaster ovens and car ignitions.) That visions upon waking are probably real (not, as sleep researchers define it, hypnopompic). That when your eyes play tricks it’s probably no trick.

No trick even — for instance — after staring at six hours of empty hallway on videotape. Which Dale allegedly did to get this piece of dramatic footage he has finally keyed up. That’s the hardest part, he says, the boredom of wading through hours of nothing, staring at hours of wallpaper, hours of linoleum. The audience leans toward the television: a blip no more tempestuous than an eyelash crosses the screen. Ooohs and aaahs erupt from the audience as from a roomful of kindergartners. "Oh freaky, oh cool," says someone behind me. "Really freaky." Asked why he had never bothered to submit his evidence to Sony for analysis, he said, in effect, that, even if Sony couldn’t find a reasonable explanation, they’d never admit it was paranormal.

The Ghost Hunter’s Handbook — the quasi-official guide penned by Troy Taylor — defines two sorts of ghosts. The "intelligent haunting" is the spirit who lingers because of unfinished business. The intelligent haunting has personality; it is conscious; it was probably murdered. The "residual haunting," on the other hand, is less soul than celluloid. It is the actual moment of trauma "imprinted" on the atmosphere. The bleeding armchair. The incorporeal shadow. The mood itself trapped. "A piece of time," Troy writes, "stuck in place." Boarded-up mental hospitals are thought to be especially prone to residuals. In fact, the famed ghost hunter Hans Holzer, making the distinction between "spirits" and "ghosts," wrote that the spirit’s "unfortunate colleague," the ghost, is similar to the "psychotic.… All he can do is repeat the final moments of his passing, the unfinished business, as it were, over and over until it becomes an obsession." And yet the existence of ghosts reassures many here. Cold comfort, I think, if ghosts are nothing but broken, imprisoned souls. Of course, there is also the therapist-cum-ghostbuster who believes his greatest service is to help the trapped soul cross to the other side. Help the ghost work out those issues. Such is the happy persuasion of The Sixth Sense, whose smash box-office suggests that it’s not just ghost hunters who have an appetite for apparitions.

But Sense hasn’t yet entered the nation’s consciousness when the convention takes place, nor has Blair Witch; the Ghosting of America is represented only by The Haunting, which has just opened. Tonight a crew from the convention is headed out to see it, but we beg out.

Back at Comfort Inn I go for a scalding dip in the heated pool, and then watch Book-Span. Barry Glassner, author of Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, quotes Nixon, "People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true." Ed, listening to tape from our first batch of interviews, is nodding happily. Giving me the thumbs-up. The next morning we take a detour to photograph Ed (5' 9'') beside Robert Wadlow (8' 11.1'').

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